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In our most recent Web clinic on optimizing leads, we quickly reviewed a recent case study in which two banner images were tested – a generic stock image vs. an image of a real person. This experiment led to more insights than we had time to cover last week; so, I thought I’d give it a little more room to breathe here on the blog.

CONTROL: Who doesn’t love a generic smiling lady?

If you haven’t yet watched the Web clinic replay, the company (blurred intentionally) we were working with in this experiment was a consumer credit counseling service offering free debt consultation. Their homepage had been the focus of many previous radical redesign tests, but for the scope of this research project, we were focusing on one particular issue: The main banner image. Read more…

So often, beautiful design gets trumped by marketing objectives – and rightly so from a marketing perspective. The graphical elegance of a Web page might be worthy of an art exhibit, but if it doesn’t sell anything but “oohs” and “ahs,” what service does it really provide to anyone?

True, but it is at this point that we tend to divide. It’s them or us. Are you a marketer or a designer? Whose side are you on? As one popular design blog analyzes its relationship with marketing, “You can spell ‘team’ from the word ‘marketing,’ but I’ve yet to see a sense of it in marketing.”

But I think we (marketers) can and should live in both worlds. I believe design can be done in such a way as to actually contribute to the perceived value of an offer without being a distraction. I think marketing, whether they can measure it or not, is leaving money on the table when design is viewed as optional icing on the cake. Yes, I have a dream…

But, feelings aside, we must always default to testing – not our gut instincts. And so I was glad to see a recent experiment bring a little shimmer of hope to those of us who long for the day when these two often opposing worlds come together. Read more…